I always wanted to be a dad, just at some point in the future though. If someone asked if I wanted kids, I’d give a faint, sure, and then continue on a conversation about drunken nights, a new band in town or hockey. That was the extent that my brain would allow me to envision fatherhood. It was for a future me that I still considered a stranger. Dads to me were always middle aged men entrenched in a stable career with an understanding of mortgages. Not students in basement apartments.

The night I found out I was going to be a dad, I came home in an ethereal state of mind after seeing the Icelandic band Sigur Ros perform at Massey Hall in Toronto. Their music has a whimsical beauty that seems best fit for the soundtrack to a dreamless sleep in a park. Their is a slow progression to their songs, taking you through an epic journey with each tune. Their foreign lyrics, dissolved from any literal meaning, became a cozy blanket over my thoughts. The perfect intermission between two chapters of my life.

Even their album cover above looks like a baby in the womb.

So when I strolled into our basement apartment still masked in a dream-like daze from the concert, the thought of a baby’s heartbeat, my baby’s heartbeat, existing in the same room as me was the farthest thing from my mind. I came in rambling about nothing, as I often do, before my partner Rachael told me that “we had to talk”. Classic breakup words, which, in retrospect, is the exact opposite of what they meant in that moment. And when the words I’m pregnant spluttered out of her mouth, all I could say was the one word that embodied every one of the hard emotions that bursted into my body at once: woah. That word carried the feeling of joy wrapped in the dreaded fear and shock of an unplanned pregnancy. It was the excitement of something I knew I wanted for a future version of myself. I was on a spaceship to another planet and realized they forgot to train me. Woah.

I did not sleep much that night. I thought about the type of dad I wanted to be. I thought of the things I had to change, things I liked and things I didn’t. I thought about the world that this baby would enter into. I thought in decades, which is something I didn’t even know my brain could do before. I thought about environmental degradation and the bleak political climate. I thought about ways I could make a difference and all the realities of how I couldn’t. I thought about commitments I would make to myself, to my partner, to the world, but most importantly to this imaginary being that was growing in the girl next to me. These were thoughts that I had daydreamed about and now I had to find ways to make them concrete.

Over the next couple of days filled with doubt and renewal, these feelings eventually mutated into something primal. You start to feel this raw connection to the entire history of mankind. A secret key that related me to every one of my ancestors. I come from a long line of people that had kids and passed on their genetic make-up. Now I will continue that. In fact, every one of the thousands of people I was walking past was a product of someone having a child. I felt human in a way I had never felt before. A feeling shared with many, yet so utterly and deeply personal.

I still feel some of these feelings a year after her birth. The magic of that Sigur Ros concert still acts like the opening credits to a new life. The start of a movie, where everything that happened before is just classified as “character development”. I feel connected to other parents now in a way I never thought I would. I give the nod to another dad walking along with a stroller. I take pleasure in someone else describing their kids nuances (one that is undoubtably only enjoyed by a fellow parent). I entered a club that night that I wasn’t expecting on joining. One that I didn’t think I’d fit in with. One I didn’t think I would enjoy as much as I do now. At least not in that moment. On that night.